Join the Navy, Kill Some Whales

Despite the acknowledged harm to ocean mammals, the Navy begins testing a sonar system off the coast of San Diego. Zoran Kovacevic

With the official all-clear from President Bush, the U.S. Navy began underwater sonar training off the San Diego coast this week, despite its own estimates showing that hundreds or thousands of whales will be harmed by the high-frequency pings being pumped into the Pacific.

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Lt. Mark Walton, of the Third Fleet, confirmed that a battle group of approximately 5,000 people and an aircraft carrier are training on submarine detection, using midfrequency sonar somewhere off the San Diego coast. He stressed that the Navy is taking precautions to minimize and prevent injury to marine mammals during the two-week training.

The training comes even though a federal lawsuit filed by the California Coastal Commission and environmental groups last month won severe restrictions on the Navy’s use of sonar off the California coast under the Coastal Zone Management Act. Last week, Bush issued a memorandum exempting the Navy from the environmental law used to win the ruling. The legality of Bush’s action remains to be tested.

“This is unacceptable and we have filed a new brief to challenge the waiver,” says David Hinerfeld, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles. “It is beyond dispute that sonar kills whales — the court quoted the Navy’s own estimates of damage that this testing will affect the hearing of 8,000 whales and permanently injure 450.”

Michael Jasny, a Vancouver-based NRDC attorney who specializes in the impact of ocean noise on marine life, says there are plenty of reports of whales, orcas and dolphins being injured and dying as a result of exposure to midfrequency sonar, including strandings in the Bahamas and Hawaii, and animals in distress in the Haro Strait in Washington state.

Marine mammals have very sophisticated hearing they rely on to find food, navigate and communicate with one another. Midfrequency sonar, which Jasny describes as a screeching “fingernails on chalkboard” sound, travels for many miles in the water, damaging hearing and disrupting the animals’ own sonar. Researchers have heard it more than 10 kilometers from its origin, he says.

No one is certain why sonar results in beached and dying animals, many of whom appear to have been disoriented while swimming away from the sound as fast as they could. But even the Navy concedes that sonar can cause harm.

“Some believe it causes deep-diving animals to surface too quickly or it interrupts short dives so they don’t have a chance to expel nitrogen from their bodies, and they die from what’s essentially the bends,” Jasny says. “There are dozens of well-documented observations of the panic behavior among marine mammals when they’re exposed to the screeching sound of midfrequency, which travels very far underwater.”

Professor John Hildebrand, of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, says he is particularly concerned about a species we know little about, the beaked whales.

“What little we know, much has come from the ones that beached after sonar testing,” Hildebrand says. “They are deep-diving squid eaters. Only the males have teeth and they use them to fight each other. We think they do not migrate, but we don’t know. And our estimate of the population has a margin of error of 50 percent.”

“But we know what the ones we’ve tagged do during sonar testing,” he said. “They engage in very unusual behavior: They glide to the surface at an angle to get away from the sonar.”

The Navy is taking precautions that include stationing trained lookouts, passive acoustic monitoring for marine mammals, using night-vision equipment and establishing safety zones around the ships, Walton said in a written statement. Many of the precautions echo the restrictions in the now-abandoned federal court order.

“Not a single marine mammal has stranded as a result of sonar operations in the 40 years we have conducted anti-submarine training in this area,” the statement notes. “This demonstrates that the Navy can protect the environment and ensure national security.”